Your best opensource package ?

[CADMatt]

Hi Mark,

Your work looks pretty impressive. I've passed thru these forums many times but only just registered, I had half a mind to write some CAM software until I saw just what good stuff can be found already.

Anyway, about your 'challenge' of keeping to maximum accuracy.. (not to poo-poo your ideas one bit, just giving you my perspective )

When we started using CAM 10+ years ago, we exported our models as triangulated meshes to a tolerance of 0.01mm, our finishing passes would typically be to 0.01mm tolerance too. Even taking into account cutter variation, machine tolerances, not always the best cutting conditions etc, we could easily hit +/-0.03mm all over large (over 1m long) 3d forms (they were inspected to the original CAD data too, not the triangulated mesh). IMO cutting any closer than this is as much a black art as it is numerical accuracy.

Here's a contradiction in your accuracy logic though; You want to pick out a fillet feature and cut it with a form tool (or correct dia ball nose). Cutting conditions almost never favour this approach. I've cut materials ranging from resin based tooling boards to hardened tool steels and I shudder at the thought of running a full rad cut over a fillet like that. So you may be looking to provide a feature that's actually unusable in practice.

Cheers
Matt

[mpictor]

Originally Posted by CADMatt Hi Mark, Your work looks pretty impressive. I've passed thru these forums many times but only just registered, I had half a mind to write some CAM software until I saw just what good stuff can be found already. Anyway, about your 'challenge' of keeping to maximum accuracy.. (not to poo-poo your ideas one bit, just giving you my perspective ) When we started using CAM 10+ years ago, we exported our models as triangulated meshes to a tolerance of 0.01mm, our finishing passes would typically be to 0.01mm tolerance too. Even taking into account cutter variation, machine tolerances, not always the best cutting conditions etc, we could easily hit +/-0.03mm all over large (over 1m long) 3d forms (they were inspected to the original CAD data too, not the triangulated mesh). IMO cutting any closer than this is as much a black art as it is numerical accuracy. Here's a contradiction in your accuracy logic though; You want to pick out a fillet feature and cut it with a form tool (or correct dia ball nose). Cutting conditions almost never favour this approach. I've cut materials ranging from resin based tooling boards to hardened tool steels and I shudder at the thought of running a full rad cut over a fillet like that. So you may be looking to provide a feature that's actually unusable in practice. Cheers Matt

Yeah, I keep forgetting that the company I work for is a world apart from most. They don't have any gages less accurate than 1 micron. Almost every gage reads to .01 or .001 microns, and I've seen printouts with 5 or 6 digits after the decimal point.

The extreme accuracy I wanted *is* overkill for 99.999% of users, and the other 0.0001% wouldn't have any use for cam-occ.

Since I last wrote in this thread, I've been left in the dust by another guy, Dan Heeks. If you are looking for usable open source CAM software, you'll want heekscad and heekscam. It still has rough edges and isn't all that intuitive at the moment, but it can generate accurate toolpaths for roughing and finishing. It also uses freesteel's adaptive clearing.

http://code.google.com/p/heekscnc/

I'll contribute to HeeksCAD if I find time to learn the internals. In the mean time, I'm still puttering around with cam-occ a bit. If I come up with anything useful, I'll probably package it as a module for heekscad...

Mark

[kolias]

Has anyone tried BLENDER.ORG ?

Pros and Cons?

Nicolas

[beege]

And any users of Synergy?

http://www.webersys.com/